GreenWire: Floating fish carcasses littered Florida’s waters after this month’s record-setting cold snap, and ecologists predict it may take some native fish years to rebound. In southern Florida, the death toll was too large to be estimated.
“Millions and millions of pilchards, threadfin herring, mullet” were killed by the cold, said Pete Frezza, an ecologist for Audubon of Florida and an expert flats fisher. “Ladyfish took it really bad. Whitewater Bay is just a graveyard,” he said.
In Florida Bay, one of the hardest hit areas judging by the floating bodies, the water temperatures were in the low 50s for several days this month and then dropped to a record 47.8 degrees at their lowest, according to the National Weather Service. The high winds compounded the problem, pushing colder, heavier waters off shallow flats into deeper channels where fish typically seek warm refuge.
Despite the warm-up, scientists say the chill will continue to claim victims for weeks. Infections from common bacteria such as aeronomas have preyed on weakened survivors of cold fronts in the past, said William Loftus, a retired aquatic ecologist for Everglades National Park.
The cold snap is expected to give less-popular freshwater natives such as sunfish a leg up, however, at least temporarily, since it killed off large numbers of walking catfish, Mayan cichlids and other tropical exotics that have invaded the Everglades and many of South Florida’s canals and ponds, Loftus said (Curtis Morgan, Miami Herald, Jan. 15). – DFM